Neoslavery: The Perpetuation of Slavery After the American Civil War

#History: A Journal of Student Research Volume 1 Article 6 12-2016 Neoslavery: The Perpetuation of Slavery After the American Civil War Ben Falter The College at Brockport Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/hashtaghistory Part of the Social History Commons, and the United States History Commons Repository Citation Falter, Ben (2016) "Neoslavery: The Perpetuation of Slavery After the American Civil War," #History: A Journal of Student Research: Vol. 1 , Article 6. Available at: http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/hashtaghistory/vol1/iss1/6 This Paper is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @Brockport. It has been accepted for inclusion in #History: A Journal of Student Research by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @Brockport. For more information, please contact . NEOSLAVERY: THE PERPETUATION OF SLAVERY AFTER THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR Ben Falter, The College at Brockport Abstract Many Americans are under the impression that slavery ended following the Civil War. However, this is a vast oversimplification of the reality that Black men and women faced in the South after the war’s end. Freedmen’s bureau reports, “Black Codes,” and the research of historians demonstrate the ways in which Black men and women were treated following the end of the Civil War. Comparing the conditions revealed in the aforementioned sources to the conditions Black men and women faced during legal slavery reveals startling similarities. Violence against Blacks continued to be widespread in the post-war period, and many Black men and women were even bought and sold through convict leasing. In short, slavery continued in all but name. [Keywords: slavery, American Civil War, Reconstruction, emancipation, race relations] INTRODUCTION After the end of the Second World War, colonial empires broke apart and their former imperial domains asserted themselves as independent nations. However, many of these countries discovered that imperialism had not really ended. Independent nations still found themselves under the control of their former imperial masters. However, the former imperial nations no longer directly controlled these nations politically. Instead the colonizers dominated these new nations economically, culturally, and occasionally militarily. This system is called Neocolonialism and is a powerful force in the world today. Former colonial dominions discovering that they were not truly free from their imperial masters serves as an excellent analogy to a system that this paper terms “Neoslavery.” Just as the Second World War brought an end to the colonial empires of nations such as the United Kingdom and France, so too did the American Civil War bring an end to slavery, at least officially. However, former masters still controlled the men and women that had once been their property. The new Freedmen may not have been called slaves anymore, but they were far from free. In short, though the American Civil War technically brought an end to slavery, Whites kept former slaves in bondage. By no means is this paper the first piece of writing to suggest that slavery did not actually end with the American Civil War, nor is this paper the first to use the term neoslavery. Both David Oshinsky and Douglas Blackmon argue that convict leasing, in which the state leased out prisoners to individuals and corporations as a labor force, was a continuation of slavery. Blackmon uses the Falter, Ben. “Neoslavery: The Perpetuation of Slavery After the American Civil War,” #History: A Journal of Student Research, n. 1 (December 2016). Brockport, NY: Department of History, The College at Brockport, S.U.N.Y.: 74-91. #History: A Journal of Student Research, Number 1 term neoslavery to describe the convict leasing system. Although Blackmon and others have used the term before, this paper uses the term more broadly to describe Blacks’ experience more generally after the Civil War, but. John Daly’s The Southern Civil War argues that Reconstruction was actually a war, where one of the sides was fighting for a return of the old system, of which slavery was the key component. These authors’ research explores individual aspects of Blacks’ experience following the Civil War in a great deal more depth than this paper will. However, this paper combines elements from these authors’ research in order to paint a broader picture of freedmen’s experience. Even without these authors’ research, primary evidence demonstrates the conditions freedmen faced. Black Codes written into every southern state constitution blatantly took away the rights of former slaves. Violence against freedmen ran rampant as former masters tried to push them back into slavery; Freedmen’s Bureau reports attest to this fact. This paper, then, compares the conditions faced by Blacks under Antebellum slavery to Whites’ legal and extralegal oppression of Blacks following the American Civil War, attested to in primary documents and other historians’ research. By making this direct comparison, this paper will demonstrate that slavery continued after the Civil War in practicality. In order to make the claim that slavery continued after the conclusion of the American Civil War, this paper will first demonstrate the conditions that men faced under slavery. Doing so will enable a comparison to the conditions Freedmen faced following the end of the Civil War under neoslavery. For this reason, this paper is divided into two broad sections, each looking at a broad time period. The first section will explore the conditions faced by slaves in the Antebellum (literally, before war) Period. The second section will explore the perpetuation of slavery in the Postbellum (after war) Period. Geographically, the focus is on the southern states. That is not to say that racial oppression did not exist in northern states, but neoslavery as a direct extension of Antebellum slavery was primarily a southern phenomenon. By examining and comparing the conditions Black men and women faced in the South during these two periods, this paper will conclusively prove that slavery continued through legal practices and through violence. SLAVERY IN THE ANTEBELLUM PERIOD Slavery was a great evil. As John Boles stated, “Any labor or social system that defined persons as property and deprived them of basic autonomy over their lives was irredeemably evil.”1 Despite the horrid conditions within slavery, slaves experienced a degree of flexibility within the system, which was often dependent on the slave’s master. For instance, some slaves could supplement their diet with food that they gathered via fishing, hunting, trapping, and so on.2 It is precisely this relative flexibility that made Neoslavery so bad. In short, conditions during slavery were extremely poor, even with the noted minor flexibility, precisely because masters treated slaves as property as opposed to human beings. It should be noted that slaveholding was not the norm. Most (...truncated)